Wednesday, June 5

The Honor Belt: Corporatization of Family


1.     Descent is traced through males
2.     Clear preference for birth of sons over daughters
3.      Growing up, boys enjoy considerably greater freedom and are groomed to assume a dominant role in the family.  As girls grow up, their worlds contract; they gradually find themselves more and more segregated from boys
4.      Girls receive less schooling. 
5.     Girls typically required to wear loose clothing, conceal their hair--may be required to wear a veil
6.     Woman’s sexuality is not her own but belongs to her family.  If suspected of having sex before marriage, may be forced to undergo a virginity examination
7.     Families marry off daughters at a young age, especially in under developed rural areas.  E.g., Turkey, 16% of women in the 1990s married before 15, the legal age for marriage
8.     On marrying, woman usually goes to her husband’s home, subject to the authority of her husband and her mother-in-law
9.      Outside the home,  public world of work, politics, law, & religion: male dominated
10.   Families are clan-like, exhibiting temporal continuity stretching backwards and forwards in time.  The family has a history and, its members hope, a future.  A married couple does not establish its own separate family but, rather, continues and extends the family
11.    Multi-generational and extended:  a man and his brothers and their sons and wives and children and perhaps grandchildren may live under one roof – or close
12.    Share common property:  land and animals owned by the family rather than by individual members
13.   Centralize decision making:  typically in the hands of older members, esp men
14.   Often practice endogamous marriage:  patrilateral cousin marriage (a son marrying his father’s brother’s daughter) is preferred, sometimes modal, through M.E.  Cousin marriage keeps property within the family as wealth is transferred on marriage goes to kin rather than non-kin.
15.   Parents often choose the marriage partners of their offspring.
16.   Honor killing (killing a woman if she engages in sex, particularly outside the religion) is the family’s social control but, according to the West, is itself criminal.
17.   The family acts as a unit towards the world.

SOURCES (more soon) Faqir, 2001:  72 and Vieille, 1978
  
When families are more individualistic, less corporate, honor offenses are handled less severely

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